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SPEL (Social, professional, ethical and legal) issues in Usability

2.
Lecture content
•
•
•
•
•
DDA and Equality Act
What is a disability?
Reasonable adjustments
Different standards
Different terms of service

3.
Learning outcomes
• This week we will be working on:
– LO2: Apply appropriate design and
specification standards
– LO4: Effectively evaluate various systems and
make appropriate design decisions

4.
Social and ethical issues
• The web and new technologies in general
are used more and more to provide
services and goods
• The web, as it has the potential to reaches
users directly at home, can diminish both
the isolation and interaction problems of
disable citizens
4

5.
Social and ethical issues (2)
• The right of users, regardless of their
disabilities, to use the web is widely
acknowledged

6.
Social and ethical issues: some
examples
• A un-accessible shopping web site would
exclude the type of users that are more likely to
want to use it
• A un-accessible government web site would
exclude the type of users that might have
problems to reach the government (local or
national) in other ways
• A un-accessible web site on health might be
excluding exactly the users that would want to
use it

7.
Legal requirements
• Usability is not a legal requirement “per
se” in the UK
– Remember that usability is about achieving
goals with effectiveness, efficiency and
satisfaction
• The discourse for accessibility is more
complex and will be covered during the
rest of the lecture

8.
DDA
• The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) (1995 –
with modifications in the following years) is the
first piece of legislation which made it unlawful to
discriminate against people in respect of their
disabilities in relation to:
–
–
–
–
Employment
Provision of goods and services
Education
Transport

9.
EA 2010
• The Equality Act (EA) (2010) protects
people from discrimination and
harassment based on „protected
characteristics‟: disability, gender
reassignment, pregnancy and maternity,
race, religion or belief, sex and sexual
orientation
– We will discuss disability only

10.
DDA vs EA (selected)
• The EA introduced improved protection from discrimination that
occurs because of something connected with a person‟s disability
– This form of discrimination can be justified if it can be shown to be a
proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.
• The EA introduced the principle of indirect discrimination for
disability.
– Indirect discrimination occurs when something applies in the same way to
everybody but has an effect which particularly disadvantages disabled people.
– Indirect discrimination may be justified if it can be shown to be a proportionate
means of achieving a legitimate aim.
• The EA extends protection:
– To harassment that is related to disability
– To direct disability discrimination and harassment where this is based on a
person‟s association with a disabled person, or on a perception that the person is
disabled

11.
EA: disability definition
• A person has a disability if:
– The person has a physical or mental
impairment, and
– The impairment has a substantial and longterm adverse effect (> 12 months) on the
person's ability to carry out normal day-to-day
activities

12.
EA: protections
• The Equality Act protects:
– People who currently have a disability against
harassment and discrimination
– People who have had a disability in the past
against harassment
– Non-disabled people only where they are
perceived to have a disability or are
associated with a disabled person

13.
Discrimination
• In the context of the DDA and EA, discrimination
means treating a person less favourably
• There is no discrimination when the practice
under question is “a proportionate means of
achieving a legitimate aim”
• Direct discrimination is not unlawful in relation to
the protected characteristic of disability, where a
disabled person is treated more favourably than
a non-disabled person

14.
The role of the DDA/EA
• To provide guidance for both service providers
and people with protected characteristics
– As you have seen in the previous slides, the scope of
the DDA/EA is quite wide
• We are going to focus only on a subset of issues
(which are the most relevant for the aims of this
module):
– Direct or indirect discrimination based on disability in
the provision of goods and services

15.
Provision of goods and services
• It is unlawful to discriminate against a
disabled person:
– By refusing to provide a service to a disabled
person
– By failing to make reasonable adjustments to
allow a disabled person to use a service
– By providing services with different standards
– In the terms on which the service is provided

16.
Provision of goods and services
(2)
• It is irrelevant whether a service is
provided on payment or without payment

17.
Reasonable adjustments:
practice, policy or procedure
• “Where a provider of services has a
practice, policy or procedure which makes
it impossible or unreasonably difficult for
disabled persons to make use of a
service” it is the duty of the provider to
take reasonable steps to change it

18.
Reasonable adjustments:
physical features
• Where a physical feature makes it impossible or
unreasonably difficult for disabled persons to
make use of a service, it is the duty of the
provider to take reasonable steps to:
–
–
–
–
Remove the feature
Alter it so that it no longer has that effect
Provide a reasonable means of avoiding the feature
Provide a reasonable alternative method of making
the service available

19.
Reasonable adjustments:
nature of the service
• Service providers do not have to take any
steps which would fundamentally alter the
nature of the service (or make it
economically unviable)

21.
Providing services with different
standards
• Some discrimination examples for web sites:
– Adobe Flash based site with only a few pages
available in HTML format
– Improper description of media files (“longdesc”
attribute should be used whenever possible)
• Some generic discrimination examples:
– Different performance of the accessible version
– Outdated accessible version

23.
Exceptions
• Health and safety
• Incapacity to contract
• When the provider “would otherwise be unable to
provide the service to members of the public”
• When the different terms of use reflect the increased
costs

24.
Examples of exceptions
• Avatar building web site (faceyourmanga.com): would be
hardly possible without using Flash or Ajax
• Google Maps: can be used with the keyboard and with
the mouse, but street names or any map labels can‟t be
read by text recognition software (hard to think how to do
it otherwise)
• Aviary.com audio editor (hard to think how to do it
otherwise)
• A number of Eclipse-based editors: they are complex
and typically unusable for non-disable users

25.
Test question!
• Service providers are required to always
redevelop websites or Web applications which
are not accessible
• True or False?
25

26.
Test question! (2)
• Service providers are required to always
redevelop Web applications which are not
accessible
• True or False?

31.
Test question (7)
• Ebook repositories as O‟Reilly Safari must
provide ebooks in formats as PDF to
ensure that disabled users can use screen
reading software as JAWS effectivelly

32.
Bad treatment vs. less
favourable treatment
• If a website is not usable and generally
inadequate for use by abled users, it is
obvious that it‟s not accessible
• An accessible version is, in such cases,
not a legal requirement
– The web developer might not be able at all to
do anything better than what s/he has done!

33.
It is not a “definite legal
requirement”
• “it still cannot be said that there is a
definite legal requirement under the UK's
Disablity Discrimination Act for Web sites
to be provided in an accessible form”
(Sloan, 2002)

34.
References
• Sloan, M. (2002). The Updated Code of
Practice for Part iii of the Disability
Discrimination Act. Available from
http://www.dmag.org.uk/resources/legal/dd
acode.asp